Momus - Scobberlotchers - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Album Tracks 1. Lucky Like St. Sebastian 2. The Lesson of Sodom (According to Lot) 3. John the Baptist Jones 4. King Solomon's Song and Mine 5. Little Lord Obedience 6. The Day the Circus Came to Town 7. The Rape of Lucretia, Op. 37 8. Paper Wraps Rock 9. Rules of the Games of Quoits 10. Don't Leave 11. Hotel Marquis de Sade 12. Murderers, the Hope of Women 13. What Will Death Be Like 14. Eleven Executioners 15. Nicky 16. Don't Leave 17. See a Friend in Tears

The 37th Momus album started as a pre-election warning against the 47th US President in the form of a song called Orange Pills (Inchdon't swallow themInch being the take-away). Somehow the American electorate failed to listen and elected Trump anyway. The issue, for non-MAGA people, then became where to position oneself on a spectrum running from quietism to activism. It's a theme which bounces through Quietism, a quiet yet poppy album focused on the sound of a real acoustic guitar (the machine which Inchkills fascistsInch, as Woody Guthrie liked to say). One might want to reduce the idiotic noise of this world, to retreat into a privileged world of beauty and intelligence, to become an introvert or a recluse. But politics cannot be denied, even by a Paris-based aesthete. In a new take on the old cliché InchFirst they came for the quietists and I said nothing...Inch One tiny piece of aesthetic activism going on here is the choice of a South American musical idiom 1960s bossa nova, partly generated by 2020s AI tools which are North American. A secondary theme - very much related to the use of AI - is mimicry, and the dialectical tug between authenticity and the synthetic, human input and the impact of robotics. What's real, what's fake, and which of those - the mask or the supposed face beneath - gets us to a more interesting place? A filmic vocabulary appears there are continuity girls, spoiler alerts, actors whose props win Academy Awards. At the end the album presents it's human author with an imaginary medal, for this is his Inchimperial phaseInch - a double-edged sword representing both his own artistic zenith and a period in which the world is dominated by new empires, old oligarchs. Album Tracks 1. The Actor 2. Orange Pills 3 3. 30,000 Nights 4. My Apprentice Devil 5. Spoiler Alert 6. The Quietist 7. Noise Reduction 8. Trauma Bingo 9. Th

Returning to Europe after several months in Asia, Momus begins recording Krambambuli with a yen for melodrama. Assuming the persona of an obscure Japanese synth-chanson singer called Megumi Satsu, he records 1980s-style songs about murder, ageing and war using a new vocal technique halfway between Satsu's rambling, guttural cries and the Sprechgesang (speaking-singing) style pioneered a century ago by Arnold Schoenberg. As the lights dim, we find ourselves in - as one song puts it - Inchthe theatre of the selfInch. The chord sequences this time are baroque-inspired and the textures synthetic, so artists like Klaus Nomi swim into view, bringing distant echoes of Handel and Purcell. A more poppy tone emerges in songs like Captivate and Hotdesking, influenced - oddly enough - by South Korean pop-dance sensation New Jeans. Lyrically, these songs make bridges between political themes of military invasion - with the ongoing Ukraine war as a constant backdrop - and the idea of personal charm as a guilty and ambivalent power strategy. A 1980 duet between Kermit the Frog and Debbie Harry inspires Men Are The Problem, a sigh of exasperation about the foolish machismo still rampant in geopolitics. Humour returns in the form of a song recounting the plot of Walerian Borowczyk's 1975 erotic horror film The Beast, and towards the end of the record British comedian Tony Hancock pops up to parody beatnik poetry. Chugging, surreal chords and nonsense lyrics finally tug the record towards the psychedelic soundscapes of Wire's 1979 album 154. And it goes without saying - this being Momus at his most theatrical - that David Bowie's influence is here too, as strong as ever. Album Tracks 1. 1. Murder Me 2. 2. Life After Sixty 3. 3. Theatre of the Self 4. 4. Captivate 5. 5. Hotdesking 6. 6. Men Are the Problem 7. 7. Clearer 8. 8. Fanfare 9. 9. the Beast 10. 10. Helio